An Open Letter To The World by Rabbi Meir Kahane (Z”L)
“The Stranger in Thy Midst” – Monday, December 1984
“…Remove the Arab stranger from the Land and let him live with his brothers and sisters in any of their 22 states. Anything short of that will see the horrors of today escalate a hundred-fold tomorrow.”…
The future is now. With a vengeance. And the Divinely inevitable, the historically immutable, unfolds as some unstoppable Jewish tragedy. The winter is here and the sound of “Itbach-al-Yahud” is again heard in the Land. “Slaughter the Jew!” Thousands of young Arabs, educated to the limitations placed on Israeli soldiers, confront them with stones and curses and taunts and pledges of slaughter. Women face the soldiers and dare them to put them down. The winter of discontent, the promise of a spring of escalating violence and a summer of raging fury.
The Arab uprising in Eretz Israel compels even that most stiff-necked of people, sublimely obstinate in their unwillingness to see what is so stark and obvious and THERE, to open their eyes and shudder. The stranger in the midst of Israel, the stranger who was so insanely ALLOWED to remain in the midst of Israel, has (once again) mounted up and risen and becomes the head even as the Jew falls, comes down lower and lower, and becomes the tail. It says everything, the reactions of the tiny people who run the State of Israel. As suicide bombers terrorize our streets and kill our people; as days of violent clashes between Arabs and Israeli soldiers drag on; as stones and fire bombs are mixed with curses and taunts of Israeli soldiers by Arab youth and women who are so clearly not frightened, our leaders can do no more than request, AGAIN, that the PLO “do more” to “curb” terror
The beginning of Jewish wisdom, in this case, is to finally, in the name of G-d, admit to the truth even though that involves the painful admission of basic error, of a fundamental bankruptcy of ideology, of a lifetime of mistake. What has taken place in Eretz Israel and what will continue to take place but in more terrible ways, are not “disturbances” or “riots.” There is WAR today in Eretz Israel, there is an uprising of the Arab stranger against the Jew in the Holy Land. The blind Jews of both Israel and the Exile, in their utterly mad refusal to want to admit the truth – due to their liberal, gentilized illusions and delusions – allowed the cancer to fester and grow both bigger and bolder, until today it shakes the very core of a State of Israel that stands confused and perplexed, with none but gentilized dwarfs to guide it.
We see the infamous “intifada,” as the strangers in our midst exploded in hate and attacked Jews, their cars, their institutions, the police, soldiers. It was a war in the full sense of the word, and it continues. Indeed, the danger to Israel represented by this stranger in our midst, the Arab, is so clearly obvious and so obviously inevitable that one would weep for the pathetic leaders of Israel and the Exile if one did not understand that THEY are the problem. And the Arab rebellion, the war of the stranger in our midst, is in full swing and, in fact, was always inevitable for the awesomely simple reason that he is the stranger in a land that he considers to be his. IN ITS ENTIRETY. That is the problem and there is no solution save for removing the strangers from our midst. Those who oppose this normal, sane, logical response guarantee the wholesale slaughter of both Jews and Arabs, and the transformation of the State of Israel into a daily and nightly hell, a Rwanda in the Middle East, a repetition of all the places in the world where people had neither the courage nor the wisdom to understand that most fundamental law of political physics: Two nations, each claiming ownership, can never occupy the same space at the same time.
Remove the Arab stranger from the Land and let him live with his brothers and sisters in any of their 22 states. Anything short of that will see the horrors of today excalate a hundred-fold tomorrow. And, once and for all, let us not fear the world. Those who stood by during the Holocaust and when Israel faced destruction in 1948 and 1967 have nothing to tell us. Faith in the G-d of Israel and a powerful Jewish army are the ONLY guarantors of Jewish survival. Let us not fear the world. Far better a strong Jewish State that survives and is despised by the world than a continuance of the horrors that have really only just begun.
An Open Letter To The World.
Dear World,
It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you are upset over us here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry and outraged. Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it is the brutal repression of the Palestinians; yesterday, it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War campaign. It appears that Jews who triumph, and who therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.
Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we the Jewish people upset you. We upset a German people, who elected a Hitler and we upset an Austrian people, who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations – Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Romanians.
And we go back a long, long way in history of world upset. We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki, who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders, who on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. We upset, for centuries, a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through Inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the church, Martin Luther, who in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
It is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you – in a manner of speaking – and establish a Jewish State. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you, and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you and thus love you – and have you love us? And so we decided to come home, to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.
Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you.
You are upset that we repress the Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.
Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.
Dear world, why did the Arabs – the Palestinians – massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you, World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews – was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset then?
The Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who – when they had all the territories they now demand be given them for their state – attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of “idbah-al-yahud” – “Slaughter the Jews!” that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream – destroy Israel.
What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today – but we should not “repress” them. Dear world, you stood by the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres. You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.
And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well – think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.
Rav Mair Kahane (Z”L)
May G-d avenge his blood.
May G-d avenge his blood.
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